In general, television sets are setup before being used for the first time. For example, a television set must scan available channels before it can be used to display broadcast channels. Some channels may be harder to scan and to detect. Many cable and selectable providers have long channel selections. As a result, scanning for channels may take a long time, e.g., 50 minutes. Unfortunately, the television set cannot be used to display broadcast channels during the scanning period. Therefore, the longer it takes to scan for channels the longer the television set remains unavailable to the user, thereby inconveniencing and potentially frustrating the new television set owner.
In general, channels cannot be added after the television set completes scanning for channels unless a new scan is performed. As described above, scanning for channels may take a long time, thereby inconveniencing the user by making the television set unavailable during scanning. Therefore, many users may new channels may go undetected.
One conventional method to reduce the time required for channel scanning is to use a fast scanning method. Unfortunately, the fast scanning method is not a comprehensive scan of all the channels, thereby omitting many of the channels that are harder to scan. As a result of using fast scan only a fraction of the broadcast channels are detected and become available to the user for viewing while other broadcast channels remain unavailable to the user.